Where’s the switch in the teen brain that leads someone to addiction, depression and risky behaviors? That’s one of the questions a massive 10-year nationwide study, with some research being done at the University of Utah, aims to answer.
“When we study the person who abuses opiates or abuses marijuana or abuses alcohol, or has major depression or any of the psychiatric issues, the research that has been done is, by and large, after they are in the throes of the illness,” said Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, director of cognitive neuroimaging at the U.’s Diagnostic Neuroimaging Laboratory.
Those studies, she said, present a chicken-and-egg problem: Were the risk factors found in the brain what “led the person to engage in the behavior, or … the consequence of having the disease or treating the disease?